About the book: year / Teofil Lapinsky (1827–1886) - Polish officer, participant in the Caucasian War, who fought on the side of the Circassians; in the Caucasus was known as Teffik Bey. In 1863, he published in Hamburg the book “The Highlanders of the Caucasus and their liberation struggle against the Russians” (Die Bergvölker des Kaukasus und ihr Freiheitskampf gegen die Russen), in which he spoke about his participation in the Caucasian War, gave a description of the peoples of the region. This is how T. characterized. Lapinsky Alexander Herzen in “Past and Thoughts”: “Lapinsky was a complete condottiere. He had no strong political convictions. He could go with white and red, with clean and dirty; Belonging by birth to the Galician gentry and by upbringing to the Austrian army, he was strongly drawn to Vienna. He hated Russia and everything Russian wildly, insanely, incorrigibly. He probably knew his craft, fought a long war and wrote a wonderful book about the Caucasus,” telling about the struggle of the Circassians for their independence at the last stage of the Caucasian War. Lapinsky managed to “notice many original features of the people’s character, become familiar with the way of warfare, with the internal civil life of the tribes." Before us is “a living picture of the civil system of the Circassians and the political position of the tribes relative to each other and in relation to Turkey and Russia at the moment when the last act of their century-long struggle with Russia began, which ended with the complete emigration of the natives from the Trans-Kuban region. From this side, T. Lapinsky’s work sheds a completely new light on this corner of the Caucasus and is of great interest.” This is how the work in question was characterized in a review of it, published in 1864 in the VI issue of “Notes of the Caucasian Department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.” For the first time, Teofil Lapinsky’s book in Russian was published only in 1994 at the El-Fa publishing center, which headed by one of the leaders of this publishing house; subsequently it was not reprinted, becoming a bibliographic rarity.